The Cellist

In the fall of 2023, British choreographer Cathy Marston will succeed Christian Spuck as director of the Ballett Zürich. She was Ballet Director at the Konzert Theater Bern from 2007 to 2013, where she led numerous world premieres. Recent years have brought her success with ballet companies in the USA, Great Britain, and Australia. Marston’s pieces explore familiar subjects from a new perspective, and approach literary and artistic figures in unusual and original ways. This season, Marston presents one of her most successful pieces to Zurich audiences. Her ballet The Cellist made its celebrated debut in 2020 at the Royal Ballet in London. The work was inspired by the biography of cellist Jacqueline du Pré. For a short time, du Pré’s star lit up the musical sky, until it suddenly went out. Today her musicality, her immediate naturalness, and her presence are the stuff of legend.  

At the age of four, Jacqueline du Pré took her first cello lessons and went on to be a master student of Tortelier and Rostropovich – a «child prodigy». She played her way to the top of the music world in the 1960s, and was exceptional in every way, not only an instrumentalist, but as a woman. She not only penetrated a male domain, but resolutely blazed her own trail. When she met the young conductor Daniel Barenboim, her bliss seemed complete. The two gave concerts across the globe, but a multiple sclerosis diagnosis ended du Pré’s career and she died in London in 1987. Her playing continues to inspire generations of cellists. Cathy Marston places Jacqueline du Pré’s nearly symbiotic relationship with her instrument at the center of her ballet. In intimate, desperate, existential pas de deux, she gives the cello the contours of a dancer, baring the creative soul of this exceptional artist.